


wishing you were somehow here again

by ConvenientAlias



Category: Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (TV)
Genre: F/M, Post-Canon, Reunions
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-15
Updated: 2019-01-15
Packaged: 2019-10-10 11:44:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,586
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17425262
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ConvenientAlias/pseuds/ConvenientAlias
Summary: In the aftermath of the Gentleman's death, Emma believes Stephen is lost forever. As it turns out, she is not quite right about that.





	wishing you were somehow here again

Emma asks Childermass and she asks Sir Walter and she asks Vinculus, for all the good it does her. None of them has any more idea what’s become of Stephen than she does. She’s not sure why she expected them to. Everyone in England is clueless about magic, and they never knew what befell her. But Childermass, with Vinculus in tow, has decided to act as the one leading magic into the new age, so it seems he ought to at least know something.

No one knows anything. All she knows is that Stephen was going to kill them, kill them with a sword and with strangled terror in his eyes, and then he was carried away by a flock of ravens and the Gentleman ran after them and neither of them came back.

The first news she gets comes in a letter, not from any distinguished magician, but from Arabella Strange.

The letter is mostly about what has befallen Arabella herself. She has ended up in Florence, and she saw Mr. Strange left behind in faerie, along with Mr. Norrell. She has only vague ideas of how Emma protected her in faerie but she does have a few, and she is grateful. And she invites Emma to join her in Florence.

The mention of Stephen is only brief.

“I saw him in the center of a whirlwind,” Arabella writes, “Bearing great power. He and the Gentleman stood there, with all the energy in the room collapsing in on them. A horrible thing to behold! Before Jonathan pushed me to the door he had created, I heard Stephen yelling in a voice he’d never used before. I fear he is lost to us.”

It is a while before Emma can finish the letter, having read that. But when she is done, she is decided: she will go to Florence. There is nothing in England for her anymore.

* * *

 

Florence is lovely. It is lovely to be awake at day and asleep at night. It is lovely to talk to Arabella with nothing standing between them. It is lovely to meet men and women who think her bright and clever and mysterious rather than mad.

It is all very lovely, but sometimes Emma will catch a glimpse of someone out of the corner of her eye—a tall black man with his hair pulled back in a braid, no wig, or a man in a tidy suit who just happens to have similar posture, or sometimes just a person who stands behind her at the same angle as he used to when he pushed her chair around—and her heart skips a beat, and when she starts breathing again, and knows that it is not Stephen, will never be Stephen, never, she feels the old tightness of despair in her chest.

Sometimes her victory feels Pyrrhic.

* * *

 

It is years before she returns to England, three years to be exact. She loves Italian society, and she does not look forward to adding grist to the rumor mill back in London. But Arabella, who has been doing research on how to find and return her husband, needs to communicate with Mr. Childermass and Mr. Segundus, needs access to the Starecross library—besides which, she has always been more of a stay-at-home than Emma in the first place.

“You need not return with me,” she tells Emma, but Emma knows she must.

The ship back is swift. She has a respect for the rocking of water, which is still steadier than the imbalance of faerie. She dreads setting foot again on English soil, but she hides it. Until they dock, and then she asks Arabella if instead of taking a coach straightway to the Strange estate, they may stay at an inn for the night. She is not ready yet to face anyone she knows.

“Of course. I am sure we both need the rest.”

Emma is thankful she does not interrogate.

She stays awake late that night, working on a piece of embroidery. She is in a separate room from Arabella, so she may keep the lights on. She is so focused that she almost does not hear the floorboards creaking, but she does, and she looks up, and there in the mirror—the mirror she almost covered up, but decided not to in a moment of angry courage—there in the mirror, striding ever closer, is Stephen.

Only it is not Stephen, because the man in the mirror has eyes that glow, ever so faintly, and he is dressed in black still but on his head he wears a silver crown.

_The king, the new king, like the Gentleman foretold it_ , Emma thinks, and she is very frightened, and she scrambles out of her chair and before Stephen can get any closer she grabs a vase and she smashes the mirror to bits.

In the morning she pays for the damages.

* * *

 

By the next week she decides she has been very stupid.

“Not necessarily,” Segundus muses. She is staying at Starecross with Arabella, for a brief while, and she has told him all about it. “If Mr. Black has indeed changed so—become a faerie, as it seems from your description—he may indeed be dangerous. Faeries being a dangerous sort of folk.”

She crosses her arms. “I know faeries well enough, and I know Stephen. And it looked like it was still him. He had just begun to smile in greeting when I…” When she smashed the mirror to shut him out.

She feels very badly, but she has, nevertheless, been avoiding mirrors since then.

“It has been so long since I have seen him,” she says. “I do not know how to feel. I was not expecting to see him again at all. I thought him lost forever—and what if it is not really him? But when I saw him, it did appear to me he was the same, despite his changes.”

She tells Segundus all about how the Gentleman used to foretell Stephen becoming a king. She told him before, once, before leaving for Florence, thinking he deserved a full explanation of events. Now he listens as intently as he did then.

“The prophecy has come true, it must have,” she finishes. “He is a king, and the Gentleman is gone… what can be true but that he has inherited the Gentleman’s throne? I do not see what else it could be.”

“Any number of things, I’m sure. We don’t know much about faeries. But,” Segundus says, raising a finger, “milady knows more than any of us, and I daresay you are right.”

“Then he will be bound to faerie, and changed to the bone.” Emma swallows. “What a fate to have suffered.”

Segundus hums, not exactly disagreeing but not exactly agreeing either. “He has all the power of the Raven King. He is the most powerful man, perhaps, in the history of England. It seems to me…” but he does not finish, for Emma frowns at him.

“He was my friend.”

Segundus raises his eyebrows. “Well,” he says delicately, “you two being close, it seems to me that it might not be a bad idea for you to make contact with him. Not only could it assuage your worries, but we could learn much more of the current state of affairs in faerie—something which has been troubling us greatly.”

_But I can’t_ , Emma wants to say. _How can I, how can I? He is so powerful, and I swore never to have anything to do with faeries again_. And, too, there is the part of her that always held a grudge against Stephen, lying dormant until now, that rouses itself to call out to her, reminding her of all the times Stephen did not fight the Gentleman’s will, all the times he allowed her to be thought mad, all the times he did not do all he could have to help her.

But then, too, there were the times when he had been patient with her when everyone else had abandoned her. The days he sat in her room with her and listened to her rave insensibly, the days on a faerie dance floor when his was the only Christian face in sight, the million times she had known he was the only person in the world who knew what she was going through. And he still is, in a way. Arabella remembers so little of faerie, knows so little of what Emma underwent. Stephen knows, though. And she knows the cross Stephen bore, too.

And—there is something in her throat—and…

“How shall I go about it, then?” she asks. “We can’t summon him.” Even if she knew the way to go about it, to do such a thing to a friend, to Stephen in particular, seems not only wrong but rude.

“Well, milady, we can start by removing the covers over the mirrors in the house,” Segundus says. “And then we shall see if Mr. Black will make the first move for us. Then, if he does not, we shall proceed with our own efforts.”

* * *

 

But as it turns out, Stephen does indeed arrive, that very night, of his own accord.

He strides into her room even faster than the time before, and when he emerges from the mirror he walks over to her and stops only inches short. His eyes are anxious; still, they glitter.

“My—Lady Pole,” he says. His voice is not as monstrous as Arabella described it, at least. It is normal; perhaps a bit more tremorous than usual. “Wherever have you been? I have searched all over English soil for you, and until this fortnight you were nowhere to be found.”

She swallows. _He’s_ asking _her_? It is almost enough to make her laugh, were she not trembling with nerves. “I was in Florence,” she says. “I…I left Sir Walter, you see. We are divorced, now. There was nothing here to keep me.”

“Oh. I see.”

There was always a shade of sadness in Stephen’s voice and his posture when another servant left the Pole manor, back when Emma’s madness was frightening them all away. A subtle weariness. There are shades of it here, tonight, but there is something else as well.

“Perhaps it is as well that you divorced Sir Walter Pole,” he says after a moment. “I do not think I like that family anymore, though to be fair, since your disappearance, I have been steering clear of them. It has not been difficult.”

Her _disappearance_. Ha. But there are more important matters. “Because you have been in faerie?”

“Yes. And I have been very busy. Well, I don’t need to tell you—putting that place into any sort of order is near impossible. My predecessor left a nice mess behind him.” But a smile settles on his lips. Yes, Stephen loves arranging things and organizing them and getting them the way he likes. Odd to think of him doing the same with a kingdom, or imposing any sort of order on faerie, but the more Emma thinks about it, and the more she looks at him, here, alive, the more plausible it all seems.

“I would not have imagined it to be possible, no.” She perches on her bed. “Will you  tell me about it?”

* * *

 

He stays long hours. She keeps her lamp burning. When dawn breaks, he tells her he should be going, really, and she almost lets him run off and away, back to faerie and his organizing and away from her. But she pulls at his sleeve and says, “You must stay for breakfast.”

He gives her a skeptical look. “Must I?” He is not her servant anymore.

She subsides. “Well, if you did, it would make Mr. Segundus and Mr. Honeyfoot and Mrs. Strange all very happy. And I would be very happy too. Besides, there is no law that faeries cannot eat human food.”

“I am not faerie, exactly,” he informs her.

“All the more reason to stay.”

“Very well. For the morning.”

He takes the seat next to her at the breakfast table. Segundus makes awkward remarks about how his magic is making him glow like a beacon, and Honeyfoot interrogates him with great eagerness, but he responds to it all with poise. Before he leaves, Arabella gives him a basket of food for the road and tells him that she is grateful, for his killing the Gentleman freed her too. He tips his crown ironically, as if he cannot take her thanks seriously.

“But it is good you thanked him regardless,” Emma tells her afterward. “He carries the weight of the world on his shoulders right now. He should know the good he has done.”

Arabella smiles. “I hope he will come back. We have lost too many friends.” But she is quiet after that, and Emma knows she is thinking about Jonathan. She can never stop thinking about Jonathan.

* * *

 

After that, Stephen comes back time and again. Out of mirrors, out of mist. Sometimes he’ll come striding up the road as if he has been in town. Maybe he has; he never tells Emma all his adventures, because it would take far too much time.

Emma is still at Starecross. Stephen marvels that she has stayed.

“You hated these walls. You felt them like a prison!”

“It was a fortress, too. Besides, Mrs. Strange needs to be here. I’ll stay until she has her husband back.”

“And then you’ll go?”

Emma shrugs. “I do not want to get in the way of marital bliss.”

Stephen nods. “Where will you go, then? Will you return to Florence?”

His magic, he has explained before, could not reach her in Florence. There are boundaries to how far an English faerie can travel—in faerie he can go anywhere, but in the human world he is very limited.

“I do not think so,” Emma says.

“Where, then?”

She looks at him, at the tension in his body, in his face. Ah, if she could only say, _I will go with you to faerie, to Hope Restored, and we will live there happily, in the kingdom you have built_. But no, the thought gives her shivers. Even if Stephen rebuilt it to be the homeliest, safest, nicest kingdom in the world, she will never forget the wild revels she witnessed there, nor her imprisonment. Starecross is one thing; faeries is another.

“I…I will stay in England,” she says. “Otherwise, I do not know. I suppose it will be a while yet.”

Stephen nods.

She adds impulsively, “I must stay in England, of course. I would miss you otherwise.” Stephen looks at her, and though what she has said is innocent enough—they are friends, after all, old friends who know each other better than anyone—she flushes.

“I would miss you too,” Stephen says quietly.

She wonders, then, if she will be allowed… and she reaches up and touches his cheek, to see whether he will look at her the way he used to look at the Gentleman when he did the same thing, or differently.

He looks at her differently. But, she thinks, perhaps it is not what she hopes. He still seems so uncertain…

And then he bends down and kisses her, and she knows in that moment that she will never be so happy to be wrong about anyone as about him: that he lives, that he is still himself, that he loves her.

**Author's Note:**

> So apparently I now ship Stephen with everyone. Thought writing a Stemma fic would be a decent start, tho...they're canon-adjacent and no one can tell me post-canon Emma isn't preoccupied with what happened to Stephen. Which, I just realized, NO ONE LEFT IN THE HUMAN WORLD KNOWS. So that's lovely.  
> Anyways, comments and kudos would be much appreciated! :) or come talk to me on tumblr at convenientalias.


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